Sorry Not Sorry: (Non-) Apology, Satire, and the Vacuum

This essay considers the theme of apology and what happens when the demand for apology is subverted, using the Vacuum newspaper as a case study. I consider the argument that played out in 2004 between the Vacuum and Belfast City Council, which partially funded its production. The Vacuum’s publication of themed double issues entitled ‘God’ and ‘Satan’ provoked the ire of conservative Council Members who proposed that the publication's editors must apologize to Members of the Council and the citizens of Belfast for the offence they had caused. In so doing, the publication secured its place as one of the most controversial Northern Irish print publications of recent years. In their response to the Council’s demand – a themed ‘Sorry’ issue – the Vacuum’s editors struck a defiant tone. Media discourse around the ‘Sorry’ issue of the Vacuum has centred on the element of public spectacle it generated, but this essay represents a reconsideration of its importance. I read it as informed by an ethics of resistance. By refusing to be co-opted into making a sham apology, the ‘Sorry’ issue illuminates the crucial importance of apology in the place and time of its production – in a country still reeling from the violence of the Troubles.

‘Forlorn on the Fringe of Life’: Exploring Working-Class Childhood in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

In Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Life of Ma Parker’, the old, widowed charwoman is plagued by ‘unbearable’ thoughts of her deceased grandson Lennie: ‘Why did he have to suffer so?’ Lennie’s unfortunate death in the story is not a solitary instance of tragic portrayal of working-class childhood in Mansfield’s short fiction. In several of her tales she empathetically explores the marginalized existence of such children, occasionally juxtaposing their deplorable existence with their elite counterparts’. From social exclusion, child labour, parental rejection, infant and child mortality on the one hand to physical and verbal abuse, bullying in the school and appalling living conditions on the other; Mansfield's exploration of the working-class childhood in her short fiction is not only psychologically complex but sociologically significant. Focusing on the relevant short stories in her oeuvre, this brief analysis intends to closely examine such depictions of marginalized childhood experiences, particularly in light of the oppressive societal conditions that validate their repressive alienation and sufferings. Tracing various biographical circumstances that may have fostered Mansfield’s deep empathy with the children’s’ predicament, this analysis also draws attention to her subtle oblique narrative strategies that effectively represent the plight of working-class children in a convincing and an ingeniously nuanced manner.

Contesting Homogeneity: Stereotypes and Heteronormativity in Aruni Kashyap’s His Father’s Disease

This article analyses Aruni Kashyap’s short story collection His Father’s Disease. Kashyap challenges hegemonic structures through an emerging writing area tentatively classified as ‘Anglophone fiction from Northeast India’. By engaging with Foucault’s reading of Power/Knowledge this article examines the disciplining of literary regionalism (Anglophone literature from Northeast India), territory and sexuality encapsulated in Kashyap’s exposition of heteronormative societies across cultures. Through the stories Kashyap weaves a dialogic space within the narrative world that challenges various forms of stereotypes relating to regional representation in literary works as well as regional identity and sexuality prevailing in the contemporary world’s existing social and literaryscape. Therefore, it becomes pertinent to observe how Kashyap’s text becomes a site of contention where on one hand the stereotype is accommodated within the power structure, hence controlled and regulated by various agencies, and on the other hand the same knowledge is appropriated by the author as a counter-narrative/reverse-discourse.

‘“Gott Strafe England”: Ivor Gurney’s Strafes and Ways’

This essay describes Ivor Gurney’s use of the word ‘strafe’ in his poems of the First World War. At the outbreak of the War, the word was a new arrival in the English national consciousness. It had come to prominence in the German Army’s slogan, ‘Gott strafe England’ (‘God punish England’). Allied counterpropagandists soon redeployed this slogan as evidence that the German people were hateful and frenzied, and it gained currency as an informal English noun for a German artillery bombardment. In poems dating from during and after the War, Gurney draws on ‘strafe’s’ interlinguistic existence to express his contempt for the two powers’ propaganda. In treating the word as fluctuating between two languages, Gurney stages his separation from both English and German narratives of nationhood. Tracking his use of the word ‘strafe’ shows how he described the importance of individual experiences for understanding the War, portrayed a sense of ‘Wonder’ that he suggested could define soldier poets, and expressed his post-war belief that England had betrayed him. By outlining how Gurney attached these possibilities to ‘strafe’, this essay contributes to the wider critical understanding of how and why he wrote about his War experiences.

Decolonize Practical Criticism?

This article reflects on what it might mean to decolonize practical criticism in the current moment by considering previous responses to the same imperative. It discusses critical and institutional interventions by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Mervyn Morris, Chidi Amuta, and, more recently, Harry Garuba and Benge Okot. In this way, the article demonstrates that the antidote to colonial paradigms of literary criticism has not been a pedagogy that prioritizes context over text but a critical practice oriented to a work’s formal and technical context of intelligibility. Such a practice demands that readers inhabit the literary constraints and possibilities encountered by postcolonial or otherwise peripheral writers.

Knowing Outside of English: Decolonizing at York

In early 2020, Eugenia Zuroski published a short article in MAI journal's toolkit series critiquing conventional introductory exercises in the university classroom. Called ‘Where Do You Know From?’, the task ‘illustrate[s] the importance of attending conscientiously to the ways we relate to one another in the classroom as part of our pedagogical and political responsibilities’. In this piece, Alexandra Kingston-Reese and Shazia Jagot discuss where they know from and how this knowledge has impacted their teaching, research, and development of the University of York's Decolonising Network.

Adapting the Australian Canon and Decolonizing the Tertiary Classroom: Settler Students Respond to Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife

The ‘Drover’s Wife Reading Group’ was a collaborative teacher–student project piloted between 2018 and 2020 at Federation University Australia with the intention to create spaces for decolonization, particularly settler (un)learning, beyond the limits of the tertiary English classroom. Drawing upon aspects of reader–response theory, the project began as a small constructivist study in that it sought, initially, to gauge the different responses undergraduate settler students had to a work of Indigenous Australian literary adaptation. However, the transformative nature of the text being engaged with – Leah Purcell’s play, The Drover’s Wife (2016), a literary work which has been widely recognized for the critical literacy it promotes – coupled with the sophistication of the participants’ various responses to it, quickly saw the project shift to one of intense collaboration, with the students involved becoming partners in shaping the project’s outcomes.